Monday, October 20, 2014
Introduction
- Why does causality matter for policy making?
- Why do we like experiments?
- Why do we hate experiments?
- Turning a weakness into a strength
- What does policy analysis look like in the real world?
Causality Matters
But it's not everything
- Decisions have to be made with best evidence available
Experiments, Yay!
Experiments, Boo!
John Conway's Game of Life
- Simple rules in large systems create emergent properties that are complex and unpredictable
- A simple example is John Conway's Game of Life, played on a two-dimensional grid
- Any live cell with fewer than two neighbors dies
- Any live cell with two or three neighbors lives
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell
- These simple patterns result in emergent patterns that stabilize in unpredictable but orderly ways
Results
